Don’t try to drag and drop directly to a vector editing software, only the browsers are able to render malformed markup like this. Since there is no artboard defined, enjoy the blank space above this paragraph. 🙂

This new one is simply garbage. Just right for a company with no taste.

It’s easy to spit out two offhanded sentences, it’s hard to pull off a brand redesign like this in a corporate environment which is an organization of people. Don’t miss the canonical blogpost with its amazingly produced example videos.

I’m probably the last person to reblog this. I really like this, even though it’s just a slightly modified version of Futura. The animation is top notch yet just enough, the typeface is solid and firm, well crafted. (On the other hand, speaking of important brand redesigns, I didn’t quite like what top-down Marissa Mayer had done with the Yahoo! logotype.)

I encourage everyone to download the animation above and look for the details between frames and the craft it’d gone into it. Polish maximus.

This is happening. If you’re entering specific search queries related to programming, the familiar interface might open up to reveal this:

Max Rosett was playing along and he was presented with a command line interface offering various tasks with what he’d spent two weeks solving. After this was over he got invited to Mountain View and eventually landed a gig at Google. Here is more.

Google has taken the wraps off its new Google Photos product at its I/O conference today. Google says Photos is a private single home for your personal photo and video collection that you can access from any device. (…) Google’s Photos service will store unlimited photos and videos, maintaining quality up to 16MP and 1080p, for free on all your devices.

1. When you get something for free, you’re the product – de most jótékonyan leszarom.

The data that Google stores is, as you might expect, kind of incredible. What we actually have is not just a coarse “video” of a document — we have the complete history of every single character. Draftback is aware of this history, and assigns each character a persistent unique ID, which makes it possible to do stuff that I don’t think folks have really done to a piece of writing before.

A few versions ago, Chrome added a hideous notification icon to the menu bar in OS X. It’s enabled by default, but you had the option to disable it in chrome://flags. In Chrome 34 you needed to disable Enable Rich Notifications Mac, Windows, in Chrome 35 it changed to Notification Center behavior Mac. Shockingly, in the current Chrome 36 Beta there is no way to disable it, as this option seemingly has been removed.

Apple in the last two years or so has spent $46 billion on stock buybacks and $18.4 billion on dividend payouts. (…)

During the most recent quarter, for example, Apple spent $18 billion on stock buybacks. To put this figure into context, Google during the same time period generated $15.4 billion in revenue. (…)

And yes, Apple may be issuing debt to fund the operation, but it’s not as if it’s doing so because it doesn’t have the cash on hand. On the contrary, Apple today has $151 billion in the bank. The only hiccup is that the bulk of that cash is overseas, meaning that if Apple repatriated that amount back to the U.S, it’d be subject to a high corporate income tax rate.

Broadly speaking, Google produces two big chunks of code. The first is the Android Open Source Platform (AOSP) codebase. This provides the basic bones of a smartphone operating system: it includes Android’s version of the Linux kernel, the Dalvik virtual machine, and portions of the basic user interface (settings app, notification panel, lock screen). This part is licensed under a mix of the GPL and Apache license. Google produces periodic code release of these open source parts, though has been criticized for performing the actual development largely behind closed doors.

The second chunk is called the Google Mobile Services (GMS). (Or at least, sometimes it’s called GMS. Sometimes it’s called just Google Services, and sometimes it’s Google Play or Google Play Apps; GMS is what it’s called in the code, though, so that seems to be the most common name). This has two big portions. The Google Play Services provides a wealth of APIs and system services: APIs for Google Maps, Location, and in-app purchasing; Google+ integration; Remote Wipe; Malware scanning; and more. Then there’s the Play Store collection of apps: Search, Gmail, Chrome, Maps, and many more.

The GMS has a few important features. GMS isn’t open source. Anyone can take AOSP and slap it on a phone. That’s not true of GMS. To get GMS, the device has to meet certain technical requirements (performance, screen resolution, and so on), and it has to pass validation. Though Google says that the GMS suite is itself free, the validation process isn’t, with reports that it costs around $0.75 per device.